People of Guana: Dynamic Coastlines, Mutating Methodologies, and Collaborative Science

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Methods for Monitoring Heritage at Risk Sites in a Rapidly Changing Environment", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

For 6,000 years, people have called the Guana Peninsula in Northeast Florida home. Now, natural and cultural resources on the peninsula are at risk of climate change and development impacts. The Guana Tolomato Matanzas Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) directly manages the southern portion of the Guana Peninsula, providing stewardship, visitor access. Using a collaborative science mindset, the project team working with the NERR have identified the need to gain a better sense of how resources were used in the past and how they currently are being used by communities to ensure responsive resource management and relationship building with visitors, descendants, and the Gullah/Geechee people descended from Africans imported by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. This paper will discuss some of the changes to methodology—including modeling, monitoring, engaging with the public, prioritizing action, and mitigating—and preliminary results from the first year of the People of Guana project.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Methods for Monitoring Heritage at Risk Sites in a Rapidly Changing Environment   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow